


Strange New World

by crackinthecup



Series: The swords have been cast down [1]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Angst, Awkward Conversations, Character Study, Dagor Dagorath, Depression, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Isolation, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Reincarnation, Reunions, Romance, Self-Harm, Suicide Attempt (not graphic), Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-08
Updated: 2020-05-08
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:26:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24074413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crackinthecup/pseuds/crackinthecup
Summary: “You may live freely in these healed lands,” Manwë added quietly, moving towards the door. “There is no corruption in Arda Unmarred; there is no need for retribution. We have sung it so. You are not our prisoner, Mairon.”After the Dagor Dagorath, the Valar allow Mairon to reincarnate in Arda Unmarred, but he finds himself struggling to cope: alone, his powers diminished, and Melkor's fate unknown.
Relationships: Morgoth Bauglir | Melkor/Sauron | Mairon
Series: The swords have been cast down [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1947577
Comments: 21
Kudos: 116





	Strange New World

**Author's Note:**

> First off, a huge shout-out to @elevenelvenswords who spent many hours discussing the idea for this fic with me and who very kindly agreed to give it a read to make sure it makes some sort of sense <3
> 
> Second, I tried to make the deterioration of Mairon's mental health as accurate as possible, and some readers may find such topics triggering or otherwise difficult to read about. Please make sure to heed the tags and stop reading as needed if anything becomes too distressing!

The battle went ill for Mairon. The host of the Valar met his and his master’s armies in might and majesty such as had never been seen before nor ever would again. For a while victory seemed within reach, elves and men and Maiar fleeing before their hatred and sharp blades in dismay. But then his master’s brethren joined the fray, their wrath cold and bright, their power insurmountable.

Mairon could not say where the arrow that felled him had come from. He only knew that it struck true, embedding itself in his throat through the smallest chink in his armour. The muddy ground was cold and wet beneath him as he lay there in his last moments: once proud and mighty, now brought so low by a nameless soldier.

Once freed from the confines of his body, his spirit wandered in an endless mist, formless and grey. The battlefield was choked with the spirits of the dead, but he could not see them, he could not reach out to them; he could only sense their presence, like invisible leviathans passing him by at the bottom of the ocean. He would have wept if he could, for himself, for his master, for their subjects. He doubted that even Melkor’s indomitable will would be able to turn the tide of battle. If they lost here, there was no more hope. Defeat would be crushing in its completeness. That thought was too great an evil even in the silent, unseeing eternity of death, and for a long time Mairon knew nothing but despair.

It might have been days or it might have been years when he came back to himself. Brightness cut through the grey of his existence, a speck of light flickering amid the shadows like a lost star, growing and growing to a searing intensity until it consumed everything else. He did not trust it, but he did not have the strength to fight it. It dragged him into its core, moulding his spirit, funnelling him into a physical shape.

Although the process of re-embodiment had never been unpleasant before, now it bordered on agonising. But no, that was not right – the re-embodiment was already complete, Mairon could feel his heart ticking away inside his chest, could feel the press of the wooden floor against his skin and the tickle of his hair against his cheeks. He tried to open his eyes, to identify the source of his pain, and found only that infernal brightness, radiant and blinding. It seemed to itch across his skin and scour through his veins, leaving him raw and hurting in its wake. He curled himself up on his side, breathing hard, silently counting the seconds as that brightness pulsed through him with a purpose he could not discern.

Eventually the brightness dimmed and the pain receded with it. Fully opening his eyes for the first time, Mairon glanced around the room he was in and found that he did not recognise it. He tried to push himself up into a sitting position from where he was lying on the floor, but his arms trembled violently and then gave way, unable to support his weight. The sudden weakness coursing through him shocked him. Something was wrong.

“Mairon.”

He did not recognise the voice, but the unnatural echo it left reverberating in the air set him on edge. It was a Maia, or perhaps even one of the Valar, neither of which boded well. Though he felt sick with the effort of it, he forced himself to sit up once more and this time he succeeded. His breath was horribly laboured even after such a simple action, but he ignored it. There were more important things to be concerned about; if he had been returned to his physical form, then the Final Battle must have reached some sort of conclusion, which likely meant nothing good for him.

He blinked, once, twice. Faint nausea was churning in his stomach, but he breathed through it as he hauled himself up to his feet. For the first time he noticed that he was wearing plain, unfamiliar clothes, more akin to a craftsman’s garb than a prisoner’s, and that fact spurred him to boldness as he looked up at the tall figure standing a few metres distant.

He had never personally met Manwë, but he recognised him instantly. His eyes were the same shade of ice-blue as his brother’s. Mairon bit back a rush of bile.

“What is the meaning of this?” he asked, injecting as much authority into his voice as he could muster. Even in defeat he would not be cowed by Manwë or any of the Valar. He still had his pride, if nothing else.

“Your forces were routed,” Manwë began, distant but infinitely patient, his voice echoing in the air as clearly as if they were stood on a mountaintop. “Your rule was broken. Your defeat was absolute. Arda has been re-made, and now it stands whole and unmarred as it was always meant to be. It was decreed that you would be returned to your physical form to live out your days however you see fit, though to safeguard the future of this world, your powers have been diminished.”

The news broke over Mairon like a wave of freezing water. Testing the truth of Manwë’s words, he tried to summon his power, to draw out whatever dregs of strength he still had left and bend them to his will. To his horror, there was nothing but a weak flutter of power in his stomach that died before it could even reach his fingertips.

“Is this your idea of mercy?” Mairon snarled, through sheer force of will managing to keep his voice from shaking. This was a violation beyond words, beyond thought: an integral part of him torn away, leaving him maimed and useless; even if there was a way to rebuild his and his master’s forces, he no longer had the power to see such a thing through.

“No,” Manwë replied, and even though there was no pity in his voice, neither was there cruelty. “It is merely how things should be.”

“Why?” Mairon asked, and this time his voice did tremble, the foul reality of his situation sinking ever deeper into him with each passing second. He was weak, weak as he had been all those long years after his fall in Mordor, but this time there was no possible end to it; not even Melkor in the splendour of his youth would have been able to undo such a visceral mutilation of his being. “Why let me live this half-life? Why not kill me and be done with it?”

“It is not my place to give death to any of the Ainur. We were made by a higher being than ourselves, Mairon, and you know this as well as any of us. Even if I wished it, I cannot extinguish your spirit.”

Mairon looked away in bitterness and hurt, and that small motion of defeat, of acquiescence, was as the fall of small stones preluding an avalanche. He felt empty as though his insides had been scooped out and his bones picked clean. There was nothing he could do for himself or his master or any of the hopes and dreams he might once have had. It was gone, all gone.

There was only one question he wanted answered, though with painful clarity he knew what reply he would receive before he even opened his mouth. But he had to ask. He had to know for sure.

“What happened to… to _him_? Melkor? Is he going to be re-embodied as well?”

Manwë’s face darkened with sorrow. Turning away from Mairon, he walked to the large bay window on the other side of the room and opened the curtains.

“I do not know,” he said slowly, and his voice seemed to come from far away. Mairon stared past him into the light of the morning sun, gentle and golden, ignoring the chasm of grief that seemed to split open in his stomach. “My brother fell in battle and his spirit has passed beyond the reach of any of us. I cannot say if there is any return for him.”

They stood like that for many minutes, Manwë still as a figure graven in stone, Mairon staring unseeing into the light.

Manwë was the first to rouse himself from his thoughts.

“I will send a Maia to you every few weeks with provisions: food, drink, clothes, tools, anything else you may request. There is a blacksmith’s workshop at the back of the house that I hope you will find adequate. Aulë oversaw its construction.”

Mairon offered no reply. He stood rooted to the spot, looking out of the window as if the light could chase away the shadow that had fallen upon his mind.

“You may live freely in these healed lands,” Manwë added quietly, moving towards the door. “There is no corruption in Arda Unmarred; there is no need for retribution. We have sung it so. You are not our prisoner, Mairon.”

And with that Manwë was gone, leaving Mairon utterly alone except for the echo of his words.

Mairon only moved once the sun had slipped beneath the horizon. He dragged himself over to the wall, pressing his back against its cool surface and sliding down to huddle on the floor. A traitor once, a failure so many times, and now brought so low that his song was not even part of the fabric of the world anymore. He pressed his face to his knees and wept.

***

Mairon decided to keep a calendar. It was not in his nature to let his days blend together into an unending morass of sorrow and tedium. He did not know what day it was, nor even if the months still had the same names he remembered, but he knew how to find out.

As Manwë had promised, a Maia showed up at his door a few days later. They were humanoid in shape, but that is where the resemblance to the children of Ilúvatar ended. Feathers covered their long, thin body, and with every motion their plumage shimmered in hues of white and green as they handed him a basket of food.

“Wait,” he said before they could leave, and they turned to him with an inscrutable glint in their dark eyes. “Could you tell me what date it is?”

Their eyes met his, and they seemed to see straight through him, down to the black hurt that had taken up permanent residence in his stomach. By the expression on their face, they did not like what they saw.

“It is the seventeenth day of _lairë_ ,” they replied to him, using the Elven reckoning of the months that the Ainur had adopted long ago.

Mairon nodded, averting his eyes. Their hatred made his skin crawl. Without another word the Maia turned to leave, and he watched their retreating form until they were no more than a speck on the horizon.

***

It took him weeks to venture into the forge. Reluctance plucked at his heart each time he thought of it; he had lost so much, too much, and he did not want to return to the thing he had loved first and best and find it less than it used to be. But even beings for whom time does not mean much can fall prey to boredom, and eventually the monotony of his days overcame such fears.

The forge was plain and neat, equipped with sturdy tools of more than adequate craftsmanship. Mairon briefly wondered which of Aulë’s Maiar had made them, and then decided that he did not really want to know. There was something in the strong, clean lines of the forge that bore resemblance to the great Vala’s workshops in Almaren, and with a pang of discomfort Mairon thought of all that had passed since his days on that blessed isle.

He spent hours pacing from one end of the forge to the other, running his fingers over the smooth walls, feeling the weight of each hammer in his hand, tracing the blunt edges of the anvil. He felt more than a little uneasy with the Valar’s treatment of him. By rights he should have been punished. Arda may have been re-made, a perfect image of peace and benevolence, but that did not erase the countless deaths and rapes and tortures perpetrated in his name, nor did it absolve him of his role in his master’s corruption of the old world.

He did not regret his actions. He had never found regret to be a particularly useful emotion. What was past was past and could not be changed. Regret achieved nothing except encumber the mind to the detriment of both the present and the future. But here in this new world, he did not have a present or a future. His life had become static, empty and lonely, and with every line and angle of the forge reminding him of Almaren, he found it all too easy to conjure up old memories. He could not deny that there were some things he would do differently if given the chance.

A sudden surge of anger pierced through his melancholy. If Aulë had thought that he would want to be reminded of his days on that isle, of everyone and everything he had betrayed to pursue a future that had seemed so bright at the time, then the great smith had been sorely mistaken. The forge was meant to be his personal space: somewhere he could lose himself in the steady beat of his hammer against metal and pretend that everything he had known had not fallen apart. But now even that small comfort had been taken from him. From every corner and stone of the forge the past screamed at him, and he wanted nothing to do with it. It took too much effort to sift through all these thoughts, what had happened, what might have happened, what had not happened.

But then the anger drained from him, all at once, as though he had been doused in cold water. It was likely that Aulë had not meant much by the design of the forge. From what Mairon remembered of the smith, he rarely thought so deeply of matters of the heart. The forge was built in the style that his apprentices were most familiar with.

Mairon let out a sigh. He made a quick, absent-minded gesture with his hand to light the forge fire, and a second later grimaced as he remembered that it would not work. The last surviving remnant of his power stirred within him, but died almost instantly.

He stared at the cold coals. Picking one up, he tried again, willing his power forth, willing it to do this one small thing for him. The coal slowly grew warm in his hand, and though he felt dizzy with the effort of it, he summoned every last dreg of power that was left to him and channelled it through his fingers. For one brief moment the coal burned red, but then something within him seemed to snap, and the heat rapidly faded from the coal and from his own body. He resigned himself to lighting the fire by hand.

***

He made many things in those early weeks. Small, lovely things that anyone else would have praised most highly, but to him something seemed ever so slightly wrong. Though objectively beautiful, his creations were cold and soulless; he could not see himself in his work. He discarded everything he made almost as soon as it had left his anvil, necklaces and coronets and trinkets piled high in the corner of his forge, dusty and forgotten.

The only thing that he took out of the forge was a small model of the Thangorodrim, shaped of gleaming black metal, which he put on his bedside table. He knew it was childish, but it made him feel fractionally less alone.

He would take it into his hand when he woke up in the dead of night. Its sharp tips broke his skin on more than one occasion, but he did not mind. The pain served to anchor him, to make him feel real amid the nameless, shifting dread that stalked him out of his nightmares. He dreamed every time he tried to sleep; dreams of that fateful battle, of his master filled with such blazing purpose that orcs and Umaiar fell upon their faces and renewed their old allegiance without a moment’s thought. He dreamed of the arrow embedding itself in his neck, the sharpness of it, the wet warmth of his blood, the burn of his lungs as he struggled to breathe. He always woke up clawing at his throat.

As much as he was able, he tried not to sleep. It was perfectly possible for him to survive without sleep, but the demands of the body became more pressing the longer he spent contained within one physical form; with his power greatly diminished, he doubted he could discorporate and re-embody at will, and that was not a risk he wanted to take.

More and more he found himself losing focus in the forge, his mind foggy from lack of sleep and his limbs uncoordinated. Small mistakes gradually turned into bigger ones. Countless pieces were ruined by hammer-strokes that fell too hard, or overheated in the fire until they started to melt at the edges. He hurt himself sometimes, dozens of cuts and scrapes and burns that healed painfully slowly, but he welcomed the distraction of having to tend to himself, to wipe away the blood or run his hand under cold water. It gave him some semblance of purpose.

***

Weeks turned to months, and months turned to years. More often than not Mairon forgot to cross out the days in his calendar. The house they had given him felt like a tomb. He seemed unable to get warm no matter what he did; he felt fragile, stretched too thin, one small misstep away from shattering into a thousand pieces, and he hated himself for it. 

Sometimes the fog lifted ever so slightly, and it was with a lighter heart that he headed to his forge. It wasn’t happiness, not exactly, but a sort of stout-hearted acceptance of his situation. But then something would invariably trip him up, one dark thought leading to another and then another with sickening familiarity, and he found a perverse sense of comfort in it. He knew these thoughts and notions and feelings, he knew their weight in his chest and their churn in his stomach, and that was a welcome constant in his new life.

He ventured outside a few times, though never far and never for long. He was not the Valar’s prisoner, that much was true – no one had come to bother him in the years since his re-embodiment except for the Maiar who occasionally came by with food or blacksmith’s supplies. But he might as well have been. He did not know where he was in the new world they had created. His house was in the middle of a grassy field that stretched out to the horizon on all sides, green and empty. The only landmark amid all that green was a stream that curled around the back of the house, but he did not know where it came from nor where it was headed, and did not care to find out. He did not think he would be able to bear the heartache of exploring these new lands only to return to a cold, empty house. It would be too much effort, anyway. Staying indoors was so much easier. He could sit still for hours, not thinking, not feeling; it gave him the illusion of peace.

Loneliness had started to build within him from the first days of his re-embodiment, but he did not realise it until it had already sunk deep roots into him. At first he struggled to admit it. Loneliness was another one of the emotions that he had little use for. Back when he had been a commander, a lord, such things had been unseemly. What could he possibly have wanted with the company of others when he had an empire to run, subjects to account for, strategies to execute? Even later, after the fall of Mordor when he had flitted from place to place as a houseless spirit, he had still retained his purpose, the fire of his will keeping loneliness at bay. He had bided his time, re-gathering his strength, refining his plans until they were foolproof. He had not looked for his master’s return, but it had served as the fulcrum he needed to make things right.

But now there was only a great gaping void where his purpose should have been. They had broken the world and re-made it in their image, and he felt like he didn’t belong in it anymore. He had loved the turbulence of the world in its youth, the potential in each cataclysm of earth and stone. Now there was only peace, golden and eternal, and it leached his life of meaning. He did not know what had happened to the orcs and the Umaiar and the countless other spirits that had pledged themselves to him and his master. He did not know if there was anyone to rebuild anything for. 

So he gave himself over to his loneliness and his despair. He stopped trying to block them out. There was no one to judge him, no great task that would fall by the wayside if his attention slipped, and there was little point in concealing such feelings from himself. As ugly as it may have been, the truth of himself was all he had left. If he lost it, this bruised and bleeding core of him, then he might as well be dead.

In truth, he had carried a kernel of loneliness with him for most of his life. Nothing had quite managed to fill the void of absence left by Melkor after the War of Wrath. He had loved Melkor, he could no longer deny it, and his loss had cut deeper than he could have ever imagined. He had found something in Melkor, a mirroring of his own ambition, and such tremendous power that the potential of it had left him reeling. Amid his smoke and mirrors, his clever lies, his smooth deceptions, Melkor had been the only person who saw him, truly, for who he was. Melkor had nurtured his power and encouraged his ideas, and beyond that, on a level so intimate that Mairon had no name for it, Melkor had seen all the raw, unlovely parts of him, he had forced them out of him and he had delighted in them, every bruise and every scream. Melkor had undone him and he had remade him, over and over, forging an indelible bond that had linked them together through the millennia. 

But Melkor was gone; their bond was shattered. At first Mairon had hoped that his master might be reincarnated much like he had been; Manwë did not know his fate, and that meant there was a sliver of hope. But with the passing of the years that hope faded and withered. Melkor was not coming back. Melkor was dead. And that realisation brought with it a grief so deep that it numbed everything else. Mairon had grieved his master before, after the War of Wrath. He had grieved and he had pulled himself back together with an iron will, for his subjects, for the future.

There was a ragged, corrupt joy in letting himself break this time. The darkness that had taken root in his mind was seductive. Nothing had meaning anymore, it told him, and he knew it to be true. He was all alone, it said, and it did not lie.

Mairon stopped going outside. His forge grew cold and dusty from lack of use. He slept when he could, the fear of his nightmares now blunted, the tragedy of the Dagor Dagorath now become a comfort in its familiarity.

***

It was some weeks later that he heard a knock at the door. As a sleepwalker he shuffled over and opened it, but where he expected one of Manwë’s Maiar, he found Aulë standing on the other side.

“Mairon,” the smith said in greeting, and the booming rumble of his voice set the beginnings of a headache pounding at Mairon’s temples.

“Well met,” Mairon said after a moment’s pause, his voice dull and gritty as though he had swallowed a mouthful of sand. When was the last time he had spoken to someone? He could not remember.

“Well met indeed.”

Mairon stepped aside to let Aulë enter. Once he might have been outraged at Aulë’s visit – how dare he show up at his door, Mairon had cut those ties long ago and he was not about to grovel for forgiveness at Aulë’s feet. But now he simply went over to the fireplace and started heating a pot of water to make tea. He was too tired to feel much of anything about his former master.

Aulë sat down at the table, which Mairon had pushed up against the large bay window looking out towards the East. The great smith did not seem to mind the layer of dust that had gathered on the chair.

“How do you like your forge?” he asked, raising his voice as Mairon went through to the kitchen in search of mugs.

“It’s nice,” Mairon replied without feeling, barely audible over the clatter of crockery. He returned with two mugs which he filled with tea: black tea, too strong and unsweetened; he didn’t particularly like it, but it was simply too much of an effort to ask one of the Maiar for honey.

Mairon perched himself on the only dust-free seat at the table, sitting across from Aulë yet completely ignoring him as he stared into his tea.

“I wanted to see you, Mairon,” Aulë said once the silence had become uncomfortable.

“Why?”

If Aulë was taken aback by Mairon’s brusqueness, he did not show it. “I wanted to ask you why you did it,” he replied with blunt honesty; the great smith had never been known for mincing his words.

“Did what?” Mairon asked, taking a sip of his tea to avoid looking at Aulë. He knew all too well what the Vala meant, but his warm, solid presence, the bright steadiness of his eyes like smouldering coals, touched something inside of him and he discovered that he was still able to hurt.

Aulë sighed, giving a slight shake of his head, and there was so much sadness in that simple gesture that Mairon wanted to smash his mug of tea against the wall. “You had so much potential.”

A cold calm descended over Mairon. He looked Aulë in the eye for the first time since he had arrived. “I used it well.”

“Is that what you think? You were cruel, Mairon. I could say many things about your creations, but right now I will tell you only this: the cost was too dear.”

“You’ve never understood,” Mairon said with a bitter curl of the lip. “I innovated. I created things that were not thought possible. What’s the point of creation if not to push every boundary until you’ve perfected the process itself?”

“No, Mairon,” Aulë said, quietly and with unutterable sorrow. “ _You_ have never understood. A craftsman may push boundaries, but they have a duty, to themselves and to every living thing around them, of knowing when to stop. Metal breaks if it is overworked, and that is also true of everything on this earth. When you create something, your first and foremost consideration should be balance. Too much of one thing and the whole process implodes.”

“Picked that up from Yavanna, didn’t you?” Mairon scoffed, pushing his tea aside and standing up. He didn’t want to talk to Aulë anymore. The Vala’s words were stirring up feelings that he did not know what to do with. He would be lying if he said he had not thought about these things before: was it worth it, was any of it worth it, and if the answer was no, then he did not think he would ever be able to recover from it. Arda as he had known and loved it, his master, their subjects, gone, all gone, because of him.

“She is wiser than many of us,” Aulë said slowly, as though he were explaining a simple concept to an inattentive pupil. “You still know that deep down.”

And then without another word Aulë stood up and headed out, shutting the door on Mairon and his lonely thoughts.

***

It was too late by the time Mairon realised just how deeply Aulë’s visit had rattled him. In the weeks that followed, he turned Aulë’s words over and over in his mind, and they struck a chord, they ripped him apart, they undid him. He felt like he had been cut open and the ugly tangle of his insides was spilling out for all the world to see.

The numbness and the loneliness, the sadness that was a constant backdrop to his every move and every thought – those things he could deal with. He had grown used to them, and they were comforting in how completely they defined his existence.

The guilt, though, was new. It was sharp and unrelenting, a festering wound that refused to close. Everything he had ever done and everything he had ever loved had been taken from him, re-made by strange hands for strange purposes, and he could no longer pretend that he had been blameless in it.

He saw the truth of himself: a corrupt lord, blinded by his own ambition, made cruel by vanity, his desire to make the world into a better place rendered null by his greed for power; he had failed his subjects, his master and, ultimately, himself.

He saw himself for who he was, and he found such hatred in his heart that he wanted to scream.

Perhaps under different circumstances he could have weathered the guilt, he could have endured the self-hatred to emerge on the other side with renewed purpose. But as it was, his spirit crushed by the ceaseless bleakness of the years since his re-embodiment, he saw only darkness in his future and decided he wanted nothing more to do with it.

He would put an end to it. His own little act of rebellion in this new world that the Valar had bound him to in their unfathomable ways. His life had no meaning, no purpose; there was no one who would mourn him.

His mind was made up, but this could be no rash suicide. Destroying his physical form would merely release his spirit, condemning him to wander the earth houseless and accursed till the uttermost end of eternity. He had had but a taste of such a black existence after his fall in Mordor, and it was not something he would ever wish to return to.

It would have been an insurmountable obstacle for most; but he had been a necromancer once, and he still retained that unholy knowledge.

So on a day like any other, with the sun shining high in the sky, he retreated to his forge and brushed the cobwebs off his anvil. He poured every last shred of himself into a dagger crawling with runes of blackest spell-craft, imbuing it with the power to rip souls out of existence.

It was foul sorcery, and there was no place for it in Arda Unmarred. The metal squealed under his touch, fighting him every step of the process, and for a moment as he carved the last rune into the blade, even the light of the sun seemed to fall into darkness.

He was utterly spent by the time the dagger was finished. Casting an appraising eye over its black surface that threw back no reflection, he smiled with pride. Any being cut by the blade would die in the most complete sense of the word: their spirit would simply cease to be.

Setting his smith’s gear aside, he sat down on the floor with his back pressed against one of the legs of his workbench. It seemed a fitting place for him to end. He thought he might feel afraid or relieved or perhaps a sickening intermingling of the two. But it was with a curious sort of calm that he rolled up his sleeves and made one deep incision into each forearm.

Then he closed his eyes and simply waited.

***

He woke up some indeterminate time later. There was a speck of sunshine on the floor next to his head, streaming in from the small window set high into the wall.

His head hurt, a throbbing ache that made his stomach churn with nausea. He was lying in a dried pool of blood, and with a jolt he remembered how he had got there. Blinking away the black spots that swam in his vision, he looked at his arms, at the deep cuts there, and saw that they had knotted together in thick bands of scar tissue.

“Oh…” he breathed, staring dully at the scars. Like a punch to the gut, he realised what had happened. He had overestimated the potency of his spell-craft against one of the Ainur. Even diminished as it was, the power innate to him would not allow him to die in body or spirit, rising up to counter his impure sorcery even as he had fainted from blood loss.

He struggled to his feet, leaning against his workbench for support. There were no tears; there was no point to them. He wondered if he might find a stray cloth somewhere to wipe away the blood.

***

Days rushed by in a blur. His body recovered as best it could, but he felt disconnected from it as though his head were floating far above the rest of him.

There was an absence of feeling far deeper than any numbness he had felt before. It sank into his bones, making him feel hollow, static; unable to die, unable to live. He simply existed, waiting for something he had no name for.

Late one afternoon, a knock sounded at his door. He became aware of it suddenly, as one woken up from a dream. For all he knew, they might have been knocking for hours.

He dragged a hand over his face, but it did little to clear his foggy mind. With a sigh he pushed his chair back, getting up from the table and going to the door. He found Manwë waiting for him on the porch, with someone else hovering just behind him.

“Well met, Mairon,” Manwë said, giving him an easy smile, and Mairon blinked at him.

“Can I help you?” he asked in utter confusion. He had not seen Manwë in years, and now here he was, standing outside his door and smiling at him as though he did not have a care in the world.

Manwë shook his head, stepping aside and glancing back at the figure who had accompanied him. “I merely play the guide today.”

Mairon’s heart lurched in his chest, for that was unmistakably Melkor; he was standing there with his raven hair and ice-blue eyes and dusty travel clothes as though the Final Battle and the intervening years had never happened. A small part of Mairon longed to simply throw himself into Melkor’s arms, but he reined it in. This was simply not possible. Melkor was dead. Too much time had passed; if there was a way for Melkor to be returned to the world, he would have come back a long time ago. This was either a trick of Mairon’s sanity, or some horrible joke played on him by the Valar.

Mairon started to laugh. Even to his own ears it sounded hysterical, but he could not bring himself to care.

“You’re making fun of me,” he told Manwë, and laughed all the harder at the look of shock on Manwë’s face.

“Mairon –”

“No, you’re not feeding me whatever lies you’ve planned. It can’t be him, it just can’t.”

Manwë opened his mouth to reply, but Melkor stepped forward and laid a hand on his arm. “It might be best if I do this alone.”

Mairon’s laughter died away, and he looked Melkor up and down. Whoever was impersonating him was doing a remarkable job: that was definitely Melkor’s voice, and nothing in his features betrayed that anything was amiss.

Manwë gave a curt nod and a moment later the air seemed to thicken as though in preparation for a storm as he called his power to him and disembodied in a rush of wind.

Melkor and Mairon were left alone.

“You can come in, if you want,” Mairon said, turning his back on Melkor and striding indoors. “Just quit playing this game. You’re not him.”

“How long have you been on your own, little one?” Melkor asked softly, following Mairon inside and shutting the door.

Mairon whirled around, and his voice shook with emotion as he spoke. “Don’t call me that.”

Melkor approached him slowly, as though he were handling a skittish animal. Stepping up to Mairon, he slipped his arms around his back and pulled him close, and something in Mairon’s chest seemed to buckle. He choked on a sob, his heart beating so wildly that he feared his ribcage might snap. It felt right; it felt like all the wrongs of the past did not matter anymore as Melkor held him, and he ached with how desperately he wanted it to be real.

With a colossal effort of will, Mairon pulled back from the embrace. He made to turn away, go somewhere else, find a place where he would be far away from this person and this yearning in his chest that threatened to split him apart.

Melkor gently took him by the hand. “It was a very long time, wasn’t it?”

Mairon gave a tight nod, scanning Melkor’s features as if he might find some imperfection, something slightly amiss that would prove none of this was real, but he was left empty-handed.

“Is it really you?” he asked in a small voice. Melkor nodded, making to pull him into a hug once more, but Mairon stopped him with a hand against his chest. “Then why… Why did it take so long? Manwë wouldn’t tell me what had happened to you, and at first I thought you would come back but it’s been _years_ , Melkor, and I can’t… I just…”

It was some time now that Mairon had stopped thinking of Melkor as his lord. Honorifics held little meaning when any empire they might have once ruled was long gone. If Melkor minded, he gave no indication of it. He cupped Mairon’s cheek in his palm, and the easy affection of that gesture made Mairon feel young. This time he let Melkor pull him close, bowing his head upon his shoulder and closing his eyes as Melkor began to speak.

“Manwë did not know what had happened. No one did. I fell in battle and then there was a calling, a compulsion beyond words, and I followed it, I followed until I left the circles of the world. It led me to the Timeless Halls, and there was such profound silence that I was sure I was the only soul in existence. But then Ilúvatar came, and he filled the silence with his words. We spoke together of things beyond count, of the order of the world, of our role as Ainur within it, of His plan for beings big and small. He still has some very strange ideas about how things should be, but we agreed to disagree.” Mairon felt Melkor’s lips curving into a smile against his hair. “In the end He gave me a choice, and I chose you.”

“What was the alternative?”

Melkor withdrew from the embrace. The bay window looking out towards the East was open, and Melkor glanced towards it and the world beyond with a distant expression on his face. But with a quick shake of the head, he brushed away his fey mood before it could fully grip him.

“It doesn’t matter,” he replied with a rueful smile.

Mairon sighed, but did not question Melkor any further. He knew that look all too well. Some things had been lost and some things had been found in the creation of this strange new world.

***

Mairon quickly discovered that he had become accustomed to living on his own. More than once he had to stop himself from snapping at Melkor over a misplaced object or a disruption of his routine. To his credit, Melkor remained unobtrusive for the most part as he tried to get used to managing without his power, which had been diminished as Mairon’s own had been all those years ago.

The affection between them was still there, though it was cool and hesitant. Neither of them knew who to be around the other. Melkor would help Mairon cook or strike up conversations about meaningless things or offer to sleep on the couch when Mairon felt too restless with him sharing his bed, and Mairon did not know how to react to any of it. How could Melkor slot back into his life when he had changed so much that at times he seemed a stranger even to himself?

It was a few days after Melkor’s return that Mairon found himself wide awake before sunrise. In the quiet darkness of the bedroom, he laid a gentle hand on Melkor’s side as he lay curled up next to him, feeling the rise and fall of his ribcage with every breath.

Mairon blinked back a sudden onslaught of tears. Melkor was here; he was his again. This was what he had wanted for what seemed like eons. But the guilt and the numbness, the nameless hurt that seemed intent on smashing its way through his chest, were still there. They seemed to have calcified in his core, becoming part of his very being, and he could not shrug them off no matter how often Melkor engaged him in conversation or kissed him on the lips or did a million other things that should have made him feel whole.

More than anything, he wanted to feel whole again.

He would also be lying to himself if he said he did not dread the day when Melkor’s gentle mood would give way to something far sterner. He had no illusions about who Melkor was, not anymore, not after years of digging through every ugly, brutal thing Melkor had ever done to him, every delicate feeling smashed aside, every hurt and every rape.

He did not want to hurt anymore, especially not at the hands of the person he loved.

With a lingering glance at Melkor’s sleeping form, Mairon got out of bed and made his way to the front room. He took his time brewing himself a cup of tea, adding a generous spoonful of the honey Melkor had requested from Manwë’s Maia along with dozens of other foodstuffs to fill the shelves in their pantry. Once his tea was ready, Mairon shuffled over to the table, settling himself on the chair closest to the window and tugging open the curtains.

He was too engrossed in his own thoughts to notice Melkor until he heard the scrape of wood across the floor as Melkor pulled out a chair and sat down next to him.

“You’re up early,” Melkor said, failing to stifle a yawn.

Mairon curled his hands around his mug, watching the thin wisps of steam rising from the surface of the tea. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“Is something bothering you?”

Mairon looked up, meeting Melkor’s gaze. In the pale light streaming in through the window, Melkor looked beautiful, like something glimpsed in a dream.

“You could say that,” Mairon muttered noncommittally, dropping his eyes back to his mug.

“You can tell me if you want.”

Mairon bit the inside of his cheek. He did not want to upset the placid companionship that was slowly developing between them, but he did not have the energy to pretend anymore. In the end, he settled for honesty.

“I tried to kill myself.”  
  
“What?” Melkor’s voice was too loud, too sharp in the quiet stillness of early morning. He leaned forward, trying to take him by the hand, but Mairon moved out of reach and dropped his hands into his lap. “Mairon –”

“I couldn’t face the thought of spending eternity on my own.”  
  
“Oh…” Melkor sighed heavily, letting the conversation falter as he cast about for the right thing to say.

Mairon’s lips quirked up in a pained little smile. “It’s okay.”

“It’s really not, Mairon. I… I’m so sorry –”

“Don’t apologise,” Mairon said with a shake of the head, cutting him off. “Not for this. Look, I... there are things I need to say to you.”

Melkor nodded, gazing at him with unrelenting intensity as though he feared he would vanish into thin air. He made to tuck Mairon’s hair behind his ear as he always did when he wanted to say something but couldn’t quite manage to put it into words, but Mairon took both of Melkor’s hands in his before he could touch him. He held his hands, not pushing him away, not pulling him closer.

“I loved you,” Mairon began slowly, and distantly he realised he had never told Melkor that before; it felt like the most natural thing in the world. “I love you still. I’m yours, if you’ll still have me. But this... us... it can’t be like before. You hurt me, Melkor. So many times. And I let you.”  
  
“I... I know that, little one, and I –”  
  
“You don’t need to explain any of it. Not to me. I just... I’m so tired, Melkor. I don’t want to lie to myself anymore. I’m yours, body and soul, whatever’s left of me, anyway. But I need to know that you love me too, and that you’re not going to hurt me anymore. Without my consent, at least.”  
  
“I’ve always loved you,” Melkor said quickly, and Mairon’s breath caught in his throat at the utter conviction in his tone. “How long ago was it that you pledged yourself to me?”

Mairon shrugged; he had stopped keeping count a long time ago. “Millennia.”  
  
“You’ve always been there, at my side. You had a hand in everything I ever achieved, the greatest of my servants and the truest. You did so much for me, Mairon, beyond the count of memory.” Melkor broke off, his eyes slipping from Mairon’s face to the light outside, white-blue tinged with gold as the sun crested over the horizon. “I… I don’t have the right words for how much you mean to me. All I know is that you deserve to be happy, and I will do what I can to make that happen.”

Melkor was plainly uncomfortable, uncertain, and in that moment Mairon loved him so much that it ached. He released Melkor’s hands, turning back to his tea with a small smile. He felt like he could breathe for the first time in years.

“We should’ve done this a long time ago,” he said to Melkor, who sat still as stone beside him, looking dazed as someone woken from a deep sleep.

“What?”  
  
“Talking.”

That startled a laugh out of Melkor.

“Well, better late than never,” he said, reaching over and plucking the mug of tea out of Mairon’s hands; Mairon did not have the heart to tell him off.

He let Melkor slip the fingers of his free hand through his own, and together they watched the sunrise paint the sky in brilliant hues of gold and crimson.


End file.
